Annie Hill first crossed an ocean under sail when she was 20. With her new young husband, Pete Hill, she set off from England in an absurdly small twin-hulled catamaran, bound for the West Indies. The voyage made them realize that they loved the sailing and the lifestyle, but not the boat. Before long they were building their own vessel, which became their permanent home. Her name was Badger, and she was a 34-foot sailing dory with a Chinese junk schooner rig. (If you're not a sailor, Badger was a flat-bottomed boat built of plywood, based on a fishing boat design, with two masts, each carrying a single fan-shaped sail.) Aboard Badger, Annie and Pete cruised to Greenland and Antarctica, to South Africa and the Caribbean.
What makes them interesting to The Green Interview is the fact that they were retired the day they sailed away, still in their twenties. They had realized that a tiny amount of savings, carefully invested, could generate enough income to support a truly minimalist lifestyle – and a very green one. An ocean-crossing sailboat has to be self-sufficient for weeks on end, conserving water, generating its own electricity, often doing without refrigeration, travelling between continents using no fossil fuel at all.
Living on a boat that was paid for, eating a vegetarian diet, eschewing such accoutrements of modern life as a house, car, telephone, TV and insurance, Annie and Pete were able to skate along on an income of less than $50 a week. But they were not impoverished. What they found, says Annie, was “a joyful way of life.” They ate well and travelled widely, sampling the local wines, building an international circle of friends, pursuing their own interests.
For Annie, the key to a good life is freedom, the key to freedom is good financial management, and reducing one’s expenditures is easier and less entangling than increasing one’s income. And so Annie's first book, Voyaging on a Small Income, published in 1992, is ostensibly about sailing -- one reader calls it “probably the most important book ever written about cruising” -- but it's at least equally a how-to book about getting control of your life and taking charge of your time, however you choose to spend it. It is a deeply subversive book, a fiercely-argued case that there are rewarding alternatives to the treadmill of consumerism, careerism, peer pressure and debt. And that's what makes it a profoundly green book about an unusual but deeply green lifestyle.
Trevor Robertson was born in Africa, raised in Western Australia, and trained as a geologist with specialized skills pertaining to offshore oil rigs. Having arrived independently at the same lifestyle decisions as the Hills, he built a 35-foot steel cutter in Maryborough, Queensland, and moved aboard. Over time he discovered that one month of work on an oil rig could finance a full year of cruising on Iron Bark, a pattern he followed for many years. He has a taste for extreme cruising; he is the only cruiser in history to have overwintered, frozen in the ice, in both the Arctic and the Antarctic – and in the same boat.
Along the way Trevor had met the Hills, and had quietly fallen in love with Annie. When the Hills divorced, Trevor sought her out. They were married in Nova Scotia in 2003. Together, Annie and Trevor have crossed the Atlantic four times, overwintered in Greenland, and crossed the Pacific to New Zealand. Between them, over a lifetime, they have sailed more than 300,000 miles, living almost their entire lives aboard their boats. In 2010 they were jointly awarded the highest accolade in the sailing world, the Blue Water Medal of the Cruising Club of America.
Click here to view the interview with Annie Hill and Trevor Robertson.
